If it starts crooked, it’ll end up straight: Linda Lappin on John Domini’s A Tomb on the Periphery

A Neapolitan proverb runs: “See Naples, then die,” suggesting that life is incomplete without a glimpse of Naples, while hinting that the experience may be overwhelming. Thus was it to eighteenth-century travelers who described the place as “a paradise inhabited by devils,” blaming the exhalations of Vesuvius for the city’s turbulence and torpor.Not much has changed since then as we may gather from A Tomb on the Periphery, the second volume in his Naples trilogy.

The action opens in a newly excavated tomb where young Fabbrizio has come on his motorino with Shanti, a sexy American hippy-tourist who wants to worship the Great Mother in an unspoiled shrine. Fabbrizio, drop-out from archeological studies and expert forger of artifacts, has the right connections to slip her over the fence at midnight. But nothing is what it seems in Naples. Shanti is a jewel thief come to plunder grave goods. From a teenage mummy, Fabbrizio plucks a necklace triggering a series of transformative events bringing tragedy to some and redemption to others.

An African immigrant hiding in the tomb witnesses the robbery. Survivor of a sea- journey in which his daughter drowned, both the cops and camorra for the theft will blame him. For N’mbor lava, recovering the necklace is his only chance to avoid deportation. Meanwhile, Fabbrizio who had expected an easy conquest of “l’Americana,” will have initiations of a different order: he witnesses a murder and suffers hallucinations with the dead owner of the necklace speaking to him across the dark abyss of time, foretelling imminent danger.

In this crime story, it’s the reader who does the detecting, all the while soaking in the atmosphere, as scattered clues are unearthed and reassembled—like the link between the drowned girl and the mummy. In each fragment is a flash of authentic Naples—vividly drawn with its colors, dirt, and slums; its thugs and bureaucrats; its joy, sensuality, and corruption. As we zip along with Fabbrizio on his motorino through streets redolent of garlic, sewers, and garbage; trilling with cell phones, glittering with knives, and tinkling with charms against the evil-eye, we are worlds away from what Domini has described as the “chianti-dazed Anglo-American romance of Italy.” What carries this book through occasional roughness of plot is the extraordinary energy and plasticity of its language. Rich, jaunty, and cocky like Fabbrizio himself, Domini’s language startles, stabs, tickles and at times dazzles delighting us from the first page. As in this discovery of the mummy:

Most of the corpse remained under the dirt, since for a discovery like this the dig crew worked with teaspoons, with watercolor brushes. But the visible bits might’ve been some subterranean neon, more tawny than white, its electricity uncovered while still abuzz. Also you could just make out a wink of tomb jewelry. Or you could so long as the moon hung postcard-full. Already however Fabbrizio understood he’d made a terrible mistake.

A quote from Shakespeare’s Tempest serves as an incipit. In that play, crime and corruption are merely momentary but necessary phases in a greater design of healing harmony. So it is for most of the characters in this novel, proving another bit of Neapolitan wisdom—storto viene, dritto va, or “If it starts crooked, it’ll end up straight,” which is exactly what happens to Fabbrizio in more ways than one.

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Linda Lappin,poet, novelist, and translator lives in Rome where she directs the Centro Pokkoli. www.pokkoli.orgShe is the author of The Etruscan ( Wynkin deWorde, 2004)and Katherine’s Wish (Wordcraft of Oregon, 2008).Her websites are www.lindalappin.net and www.theetruscan.com